71-663: Pro: Designing and Deploying Messaging Solutions with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. If you pass the beta exam, the exam credit will be added to your transcript and you will not need to take the exam in its released form.

Availability

Registration begins: November 23, 2009

Beta exam period runs: December 1, 2009– December 21, 2009

Receiving this invitation does not guarantee you a seat in the beta; we recommend that you register immediately. Beta exams have limited availability and are operated under a first-come-first-served basis. Once all beta slots are filled, no additional seats will be offered.

Testing is held at Prometric testing centers worldwide, although this exam may not be available in all countries (see Regional Restrictions). All testing centers will have the capability to offer this exam in its live version.

Registration Information

You must register at least 24 hours prior to taking the exam.
Please use the following promotional code when registering for the exam: EPROJ
Receiving this invitation does not guarantee you a seat in the beta; we recommend that you register immediately.

Originally posted here

I have already signed up for this exam - it helps to get a personal invitation :)

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Got a call today.

Panic!!!!

All VM on an ESX host just went grey – all disconnected.

Trouble shooting steps:

1. Ping ESX host Service Console – All ok
2. Look in the VI client what is with the server – NOT OK – all machines are greyed out – (hey that is what they said wasn’t it).
3. SSH into the Service console - All ok
4. Direct GUI management to the server NOT OK. could not load the inventory
5. All VM's on the host were running and responding to ping.
6. No failover was initiated in the cluster.
7. On the console – I saw that there were 7 processes of vmware-hostd each using a lot of RAM.
8. service mgmt-vmware stop – to stop the service. GOT STUCK
9. Off to this KB  which helped me stop the service and get the host responsive again.
   
   # cd /var/run/vmware
   # ls -l vmware-hostd.PID watchdog-hostd.PID (to get the current PID of the process)
   # cat vmware-hostd.PID (i.e. 1234 is the PID)
   # kill -9 <PID> (kill the process)
   # rm vmware-hostd.PID watchdog-hostd.PID remove the files
   # service mgmt-vmware start (restart the agent)
   
10. The host came back online – all VM’s were no longer grey.

Here starts my questions.

1. Why did this happen?
   
   I went to start digging into the logs and found that there was a gap in the system logs for about 20 minutes – which is really strange.
2. It seems this happened after a snapshot removal
   
    
3. I have opened a SR with VMware to get to the bottom of this issue.

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